My random thoughts continue, now with 27 parts with 801 total thoughts! With the second Trump administration driving us full-bore into making America less great several times every single goddamn day, I've had a lot of politics on my mind lately. And there are continuing issues about AI. I worry my random thoughts are not so random these days. But randomness doesn't rule out clusters of similar ideas. And you'll still find a few other things in there about my dental habits, listening to Nirvana, the Satanic Panic, the film Sinners, cats, and more. And of course, there are memes! Enjoy!
753. DOGE is just the latest, stupidest, and most blatant version of the stupid and blatant tactic conservatives have been using for over 40 years: Deliberately cause the government to not work and then complain that government doesn’t work as if this is a universal truth of political science and not a self-inflicted injury, all for the purpose of further enriching the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.
754. One of my favorite things to make fun of myself about: For the day or two before I go to the dentist, I brush and floss excessively like a student cramming for a test.
755. Skepticism about others without skepticism about self: Is that really skepticism?
Sometimes when people think they’re applying “rigorous standards” to everyone, it really means they’re going easy on some people and applying unfair standards to others—a way that unconscious bias sneaks into the room.
756. By all means, let’s keep on message about how evil and harmful the Trump-Musk regime is, but let’s not forget to also point out how utterly fucking stupid the whole thing is.
757. I worry that AI is ruining student writing. Even when students aren’t using it to generate a specific assignment, its ubiquity is reshaping how students write in general, making style and usage more standard, more smooth, more vacuous, more boring. I miss the old days of rough student writing: amusing type-os, puzzling constructions, idiosyncratic digressions, etc. I miss seeing a student struggle with an idea for the first time, even if the ideas won. I miss genuine humanity coming off the page, messy and undisciplined and full of character.
758. AI is making human intelligence more artificial.
759. Among the general public, there’s a real, and entirely justified, anger at billionaires and those who help them screw over the rest of us. The trick will be to use this anger to build a fairer and more just society.
760. White men who worry a lot about something called “Western civilization” are almost never doing so for good reasons.
761. The right to protest is a muscle that has to be exercised lest it lose its strength and wither away.
762. What if we, I don’t know, fully funded public libraries and didn’t deport people without due process? Would that make America great?
763. It's hard to keep up with everything the Trump/Musk administration and local Republicans around the country are doing these days, but the general trend seems to be a concerted effort to destroy every single thing that actually does make America great.
764. The funniest thing about the Satanic Panic: people thought Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal were dangerous and satanic when in fact the fans of these things are just a bunch of fucking nerds.
765. Me, thinking: How can the level of extreme inequality in this world not drive us all completely bonkers?
Me, looking at the news: Oh.
766. Every new terrible, stupid thing we see from the Trump administration makes me wonder whether any of this will seep into the consciousness of the majority of Americans who pay little to no attention to political news.
767. I don’t hate anyone, I really don’t. But people who use their power to be deliberately cruel to those with less power make me come close to reevaluating this stance. But even then, it’s more pity, incomprehension, and sadness than hate.
768. Imagine if your self-image and self-worth were founded on the belief that you are better than whole groups of people who are different than you. How sad. I don’t think I’m better than those people any more than I think I’m better than a friend experiencing a tragedy. Self-delusion can be tragic, too.
769. I once had a discussion with friends about learning that not everyone wants other people to be happy. Many, in fact, are quite intent on making others suffer. I have come to accept this fact after several decades living among humanity. But it still makes no sense. I suppose it ultimately comes from a place of fear and a refusal to accept one’s own human condition of vulnerability, dependence, and finitude, which is then projected onto others, as if hurting other people could make one’s own pain disappear. It’s a short-sighted madness. It’s also unfortunately the condition of much of humanity.
770. The “they should come here legally” crowd sure seems to be silent now that we’re wantonly disappearing people who are here legally.
771. What a beautiful day it will be when we finally accept that all people are people—and treat them accordingly.
772. Like a great many other human endeavors (money, language, etc.), the very ideas of borders and nation states are products of human imagination. For some reason, we have imbued these things with deep significance, deep enough that we will kill and hurt other human beings over ephemeral fever dreams of power and violence.
773. I’m not so much asking for “open borders” (whatever that even means). I’m just asking us to remember that borders are human conventions that should serve human needs.
774. When will we learn?
775. It’s funny that “realism” in politics means believing in a great many things that are not metaphysically real.
776. “What does protesting accomplish?” Lots of things, at least once you broaden your horizons and look beyond a few dramatic, immediate outcomes.
777. We don’t know what the future holds. We don’t know what the effects of our actions will be. This can be a source of fear and dread, but it can also be a source of hope.
778. For most of my time teaching, I've gotten the sense that many students are something like "source neutral": it's not that they can't recognize legitimate sources as much as they don't think about any information as coming from any particular source. For them, information emerges fully formed from the undifferentiated ether of the internet. And given the emphasis on standardized testing, it doesn't really matter WHERE information comes from or how you got it or whether you can think about it. All the matters is filling in the right little bubble on your scantron sheet. These background assumptions make shortcuts like AI-generated text or plagiarism more appealing for students: if it doesn’t matter how or where you get information, it’s rational to get it as quickly and easily as possible. It’s hard to blame individual students when this is the milieu of their entire formal education thus far. Still, this whole situation makes teaching the humanities especially difficult—the humanities is all about using specific sources and thinking critically about them, often without any clearly defined single correct answer at the end of the process.
779. Capitalism is hearing things like “one trillion dollars ceased to exist yesterday because rich people were nervous” and then expecting people to believe that money is real.
780. A: This program/idea/institution has some wrinkles to iron out.
B: Yes, let’s get rid of it entirely.
A: But that’s not what I—
B: Eliminate it!
A: But won’t that hurt people who—
B: You only care about people because you’re indoctrinated by the Vaminish Cabal.
A: What?
B: You have the Burglebear mind-rot.
A: What the fuck are you talking about?
- "American politics right now: a dramatization"
781. I don’t worry much about “the rules of storytelling” or whatever, because life and the universe don’t really make sense. Wouldn’t it be dishonest if our art always made sense?
782. I’m not interested in a movie about people making money unless it’s a wacky fundraiser to save the local community center (or zany equivalent).
783. When philosophy students or scholars claim they “can’t understand” some non-Western text or idea because it’s too unfamiliar, I call bullshit. Philosophy is difficult, but this difficulty is not circumscribed by borders between cultures or nations. Philosophy is difficult because it is thinking thinking itself. If you let personal limitations—of geography, of previous education, of personal bias, of one’s own insecurity—stultify your own thinking, then you’re not doing philosophy. Closing off an avenue of your own humanity out of fear or laziness is hardly befitting one aspiring to be worthy of wisdom.
784. In retrospect, the American right’s “tough on crime” and anti-immigrant rhetoric was always going to lead to disappearing people to offshore prisons. How much of the “they should come here legally” crowd has been deluding itself about its own bigotry and ultimate intentions? This is why this rhetoric has always made me deeply uncomfortable.
785. I’d like to think that if more of us paid more attention to the fact that notions like money, class, race, borders, citizenship, and nation states are, at the deepest root of ontology, creations of human imagination, we might work a little harder to make sure these ideas serve human beings rather than human beings serving—and suffering and dying for—these ideas.
786. The modern predicament in Buddhist terms: why do we suffer for the sake of conceptual constructions?
787. One of my least favorite genres of critique: Writers or would-be writers gleefully shitting on a narrative for allegedly violating some simultaneously obvious and esoteric “rules of writing.” I have tuned out of many conversations for this reason in the last decade.
788. Things are far too serious right now for leftist purity tests and circular firing squads. Things are also far too serious to throw trans people, immigrants, and others under the bus for the sake of political expediency. Instead, I think the task of the left is to articulate a way forward—past rightwing propaganda, past malicious scapegoating, past the immoral machinations of billionaires—toward a vision that affirms that we’re all in this together, that we all do better when we all do better, that the rights of trans people and immigrants and everyone else are an essential part of the framework that upholds rights for every single human being.
789. I love black cats in large part because they are so unfairly maligned. This basic sentiment also explains a lot of my political and philosophical attitudes.
790. I don’t think I’ll ever understand the impulse, which is apparently widely and deeply felt among my fellow human beings, to believe some element of one’s identity makes one better than other people who lack that element. Oddly, this impulse seems to be more deeply felt the more arbitrary and unchosen this element of identity is.
791. I find religion interesting precisely because I don’t understand a lot of it—especially the Protestant-inspired notion of faith (“just believe”) and the ways in which radical ideas about love and liberation become tools of hatred and oppression.
792. Remember when the richest person in the world was given vast control over the most powerful country in the world, and one of the first things he did was to take food away from some of the poorest people in the world? That is a level of moral depravity I think we should all remember.
793. The sad thing about most of what passes for political discourse these days: humanity has so many serious problems, and few of us seem to be talking about anything that would come remotely close to working toward solving any of these problems.
794. If you really think about it, real, lasting social change is always nonviolent: it’s about changing minds, convincing people to act and cooperate, and just deciding to do things a different way. Violence is sometimes a background condition, a dramatic flash on the horizon of history, but the real, deep work of change is always in the quiet drama of nonviolence.
795, You are much harder to control when you decide not to be scared all the time.
796. When you’re never completely at home anywhere, you’re always somewhat at home everywhere.
797. I’m apathetic about AI (or what we call “artificial intelligence” these days, anyway), because it’s being sold to us as this huge thing that’s going to revolutionize everything, or at least be kinda cool, but most of the time it’s just kinda dumb. While wasting huge amounts of power and water, AI cranks out bad writing and bad art while making humans think less critically and creatively, all while enriching corporations that, to put it mildly, are not acting in the public good.
798. I’m also just deeply disappointed as a science fiction fan: AI in science fiction is a cool new kind of person, but in real life (at least for now) it’s just … dumb and evil. But I guess “dumb and evil” is on brand for the last decade or so.
799. I was moved to listen to Nirvana's In Utero for some reason. I felt like I was 17 years old and through some bizarre Twilight Zone spacetime slip I was reading college essays in a coffeeshop in Tennessee in 2025.
800. That scene in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (you will know it when you see it) is one of the deepest explorations of art and history and humanity I’ve ever seen on film. Simply breathtaking.
801. I’d really rather not spend so much time thinking about and working against the rise of fascism at home and around the world. There are so many more interesting things to think about—art, beauty, love, ideas, meaning, the human miracle of being a momentary speck of the universe that can contemplate itself! But alas, here we are, stuck with rich people tricking the rest of us into being assholes to each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment